Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Dredged up another semi-ancient playlist for those willing to
dissect (no takers so far; not really expecting any at this point).

This one’s actually more straightforward than the rest
(again, what I’m doing here), because this CD didn’t have to fit a theme. I had
to keep my wife occupied during road trips. Long story short, her personal
limit for consecutive songs she doesn’t know stops somewhere between six and
eight songs, depending on the day, and, as such, I tried to make a CD that she
would know all the songs on, and one that wouldn’t make me crazy from
boredom/repetition. She knows most of the same songs from the 60s that most
people our age know, so, for me, I made some effort to step away from each of
the artist’s easiest choices. Not saying I succeeded (again, fight me), but I
did have some restrictions (my wife had to know it). And, again, I think all
the relevant artists recorded each of the songs in the 60s…the late, late 60s
sometimes.

Also, if you notice a couple names popping up more often
than you’d expect – say, Elvis Presley – yeah, a lot of this had to do with
making sure some of my favorite Elvis tracks made it onto a CD I could hear
with some regularity. This was also an attempt to get The Doors the rest of the
way out of my system.

OK, songs and rationale for their inclusion below. Again, I
was mostly looking for songs just ONE step away from the tediously familiar.
And all songs should have been recorded in the 1960s.

For me, Liz Phair started more as concept than performer: a raunchy,
female indie (still pop, but still indie) – artist. I came to understand her as
a type before I knew her as a musician…and I’d say that’s on me, except I had
only nice things to say about this Liz Phair. And then “Supernova” hit the
airwaves (my mind still flashes to rowers when I hear that song), and I
continued to think, “yeah, Liz Phair’s all right.” And “you fuck like a
volcano” confirmed the raunchy thing.

And then about, oh, 10 years later, maybe 12, I spotted a
couple Liz Phair albums on a hunting expedition – Exile in Guyville and
Funstyle (bookended the career – yes!) - and I picked those up and, holy shit,
infatuation, a full month’s worth of listens, etc. I fell that fast, that hard;
I’d wake up in the morning, wondering what Liz was up to, what she had to say,
that kind of thing. It only hits me now why that might be: my favorite song
from each of those albums does something very different. Just a glance at the
song’s titles (“The Divorce Song” (that link sucks, but I just found the original Girlysound recording - NEAT-o! (reference, what's Girlysound?); still like the official version) and “Beat Is Up”) should signal to the
discerning listener that she should expect two very different songs.

And yet they’re not such different songs, at least
thematically. The musical inspiration, sound, instrumentation couldn’t be more
different – especially given that she wrote them both – but Liz Phair sounds comfortable
with both approaches. When she’s being, writing and singing as herself, she
comes off as authentic, and that makes the clear reaches on Funstyle come off.
She has an ear for expression, for matching tone and theme; she’s neither
perfect, nor universal, but she has a strong personality/persona/personal
narrative that tells a good and interesting story, and I think a lot of people
related to it. I know I can spend days on her songs (if more her lyrics than
her music, though I’m thinking more about the latter after this week). That
time she wasn’t herself, though…man, oh, holy shit. Dude, like, it wasn’t good…

Saturday, May 27, 2017

I’m going to start this post with what might
feel like a random confession: I fucking love America.

I understand that there are a couple different “Americas,”
even and especially within the United States of America, and I love one of them
very much. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the subject of this post and the first
born-and-bred American composer of real consequence to bring our culture’s
best, particular quirks to the Old World, draws the divide vividly with this:

“’Music,’ Gottschalk remarks in his journal, ‘is a thing
eminently sensuous. Certain combinations move us, not because they are
ingenious, but because they move our nervous systems in a certain way. I have a
horror of musical Puritans. They are arid natures, deprived of sensibility,
generally hypocrites, incapable of understanding two phrases in music.’"

America, at its best, celebrates actual freedom, especially
the right to stand down from formality; Gottschalk’s notes on the “Puritans”
gets at what I find worst and stifling in American culture. Americans are at
their best when they stick closer to the “freedom” vein, not least because
dogma, reverence of tradition, and even nostalgia, are the enemies of
innovation. Given his dabbling in subtly new musical forms and his, as I’ll
detail later, bent toward sensuality, Gottschalk makes for something like the
perfect ambassador to sell that specific variety of Americanism back to the Old
Country. Or Old Countries because, as noted in this delightfully long and occasionally
salacious website, the man got all the way around.

In the last chapter, I wrote about the Old Germania Society’s arrival in the States and how they, along with French conductor,
Louis Jullien, didn’t so much expand America’s musical repertoire (though they
did), as they set a certain bar for technical expertise. When I typed that
post, there was a quote I tried and failed to find in Richard Crawford’s
America’s Musical Life: A History. The quote I had in mind popped up in his
chapter about Gottschalk, as it happens, and it deals with another particular
tension in American musical history.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I’ve decided to change my approach on these posts a bit. I
still want people to judge them – seriously, I’ll provide the wet wipes as
needed – because, again, I always, always fuck up this kind of thing. And, to
take care of housekeeping, I link to Youtube videos for all the songs in this
post, and I’m posting a playlist through Spotify. Uh, that’s that.

Instead of dropping some kind of context – except those
cases where it totally makes sense – I’m just going to list the songs on the
one-CD/now-playlist and make my best case for why it matches the title/concept.
Got it? Do you…never mind, just listen to the damn songs. Hope you like ‘em!

I called this one “Matters Transcendent.” The theme was
songs that speak to the biggest questions, the most abstracted ways of being.

(This song won’t play on any medium I have. I thought it was
something from Air’s Moon Safari, but, no dice. Moved on to Source Material…nope.
I have 213 FILES in my active music collection and I haven’t even touched those
yet. Call Track 15 this posts Unknown Soldier.)

Sunday, May 21, 2017

For once, I don’t need to lard this volume
back-story/personal history (and I’m working on minimizing that part, too; it’s
about the music, kid). I picked up Vancouver B.C.’s Japandroids album
Celebration Rock because I caught their name in The Portland Mercury, thought
it was neat and/or clever, etc. I listened to that album a few times and liked
it well enough, but nothing about it really lit my fire, so I tucked it away
and forgot about it until something made me go back to it. This project, actually.
(And, in case you’re wondering, yeah, this about half the motivation – i.e., spelunking
around my own music collection for lightly-neglected, sometimes forgotten,
nooks and crannies.)

Only one song stuck from those first several listens:
“Adrenaline Nightshift.” By that I mean, unlike the rest, I immediately
recognized it when I listened to Celebration Rock over the past week. Even so,
it’s hard to imagine “Adrenaline Nightshift” as some guy’s all-time favorite
song, or as the doorway to some complicated girl’s soul. It’s a rock song, and
a decent one, but there’s nothing special to the sound or deep or poignant in
the lyrics. It rocks and…that’s it, it just rocks.

After reading about the band – fidelity to a DIY ethic,
their struggles to get signed and related near break-ups, touring like goddamn
maniacs, a “health emergency”* - it’s almost impossible not to pull for them
(*and, yes, that last one makes really makes me feel like an asshole). For all
that, I can’t bring myself to sell them as a band anyone needs to hear; they’re
nothing revelatory musically; Japandroids sound like their influences (more
later), but with enough twist that anyone who knows them can pick out a song as
theirs – probably by the vocals (not their long suit, really). And maybe that
has to do with their long struggle to make a paying gig out of music (but,
again, how many bands I like except the biggest ones do that for long?).

Something about Japandroids - and this only comes through
their music, not deep research - makes me think they’d take all the above in
stride. Having listened to nearly everything they’ve put out (just four full
albums, plus some random shit I just found; and....best song I've heard from them...damn), they come across as guys doing
this shit fer kicks. Their lyrics, at least so far as I’ve teased them out,
revel in everything about youth – the bingo-ball-bin way people come together,
living in the moment like nothing else matters, and, when it’s all over,
remembering those times with (giddy, drunken) reverence (see, “Younger Us”).
Japandroids don’t only talk about “drinking and smoking” (see, “The Nights of Wine and Roses”), but those come up as subjects a lot, even if not so blatantly. Broadly, Japandroids
approach to music leans heavily into wall-of-sound guitar – some shimmer, mostly
drone – lots of anthem/chorus hooks and all of it more or less up-tempo. Their
Wikipedia page (link above; see “reading about the band”) lists their
influences as “one part classic rock, and one part punk.” Mmm, I’m less sold on
that. As much as anything, they sound like alt-rock from around the time the
80s bent into the 90s. Or they did at least.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

“On the morning of the 2d of August, 1848, the good packet
ship “Diadem” sailed out of its London dock, bearing to the New World, in the
midst of much other more or less precious freight, a group of German
musicians.”

That group of musicians included 24 members. They called
themselves the Germania Musical Society, and they took the United States of
America by whatever counts as the 19th-century equivalent of “by storm.” But
that story starts with a back-story. And a premise.

It’s safe to call the United States of America, as a
country, self-assured. That better-than-healthy ego has spurred its shares of
accomplishments and atrocities, but it has carried the country through a lot and
generally left it whole and, let’s face it, fat and wealthy. Americans like to
think of themselves as leaders – or, if not that, sort of “alpha people,”
better than your average [insert name/nickname of nationality of your choice]
(also, keep it clean, dammit).

Inevitably, there are areas where that self-belief trips up
a little. I’d say classical music, as an art, sits at the heart of one of
those areas. I don’t know much about classical music, certainly not enough to
state with any confidence that the U.S. has never produced a classical composer
of any renown. I’m also reasonably confident that only a vanishingly small
number of Americans could name an American composer in a street-ambush
interview, never mind one of any real consequence. Even as several American
cities have resident symphonies, classical music doesn’t move the zeitgeist so
much these days, and, if it ever did, I don’t know about it.

At the same time, Richard Crawford’s, America’s Musical
Life: A History (as well as its “lightly” annotated version, now owned by the author, An Introduction to
America’s Music) makes clear that classical music mattered. A proud lineage of,
frankly, cultural high-brows has championed classical music since the U.S. has
been a country. Crawford wrote a brilliant line about one of America’s more
idealistic evangels, Theodore Thomas:

“Where most performers were obliged to respect audience
taste enough to gratify it, Thomas worked to elevate public taste to a point
where it would be worth gratifying.”

That’s as eloquent a way as I can think of to describe the
specific tension between lowbrow and high in just about any art form. Because
this series focuses on popular music, I don’t want to write much about classical
music. I also believe that classical music counts as a clear and particular
manifestation of the argument that Europe has “culture” whereas America does not.
Not a little of what I read in Crawford, annotated or otherwise, confirms that.
At the same time, classical compositions lent some artistic spine to what live
performances occurred in mid-to-late 19th century America – and those
performances, being live and attended by some amount of the public therefore
count as “popular.” Because what is popular, after all, if not something people
pay to listen to and look at?

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Oh, man. This CD came early. I think it’s first inspiration
was The Velvet Underground’s “Beginning to See the Light.” And, for the record,
I’m now confused all over again about The Velvets, because I picked up Legs
McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me…by which I mean, I think I just
reached the break-point where The Exploding Plastic Inevitable morphed into The
Velvet Underground most of us know, and with the idea that, as Ronnie Cutrone
put it, “Lou was trying to become commercial.”

And, again, I’m shit for timelines. I have no idea what The
Velvets sounded like between 1966 and 1967 – i.e., the period when they
functioned as part of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It’s just that I’m
guessing that “Beginning to See the Light” came after the whole “commercial”
thing happened.

Also, I love that freakin’ song. As in, all of it. I can see
how “There are problems in these times, but – whoo! – none of them are mine”
comes like an anthem to privilege. I see it more as half-Buddhist release. If
of the most Western variety.

The overarching thought of what I wound up calling “The
Light Bulb” CD grows from that – e.g., the animating logic of the Serenity Prayer – or the opposite thereof, see Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” one of
your better anthems of fatalism. But isn't that just the flipside of contentment? Call it an homage to the idea that we are,
everyone one of us, what we do in the world, and for good or ill.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Among the musical legends to have died recently, Lou Reed
occupies a curious space. That’s fitting in a lot of ways. A couple passed as
icons – Prince and David Bowie, particularly – prompting a couple days’ worth
of widespread reflection on their placein our culture (hmm...sensing a theme) and hours upon hours of
reliving their music (Prince made it harder). It’s not that I didn’t see tributes to Lou Reed – this song,
about the bond between artist and admirer, ranks with anything I heard or read
about Bowie or Prince – but they showed up in fewer and smaller spaces.

That’s a function of specificity, in my mind. Over a long
career, Lou Reed wrote and played music that appealed to a certain kind of
person. His voice doesn’t sound right, and he talks about weird shit and in an
off-kilter way. For instance, pop music obsesses about sex, but it mostly on
the level of love, beauty, and infatuation; for Lou Reed, sex was identity, liberation,
something unattainable or even self-destructive. Then again, this is the guy
who, per Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, would end a conversation by asking someone
if they wanted to go to his place so he could shit in his/her mouth. Can’t
remember the gender on that one (and I can’t find the quote), and that’s also
fitting.

For some reason, I want to start digging into Lou Reed’s
music by talking about New York, an album he put out well past his prime. It
felt less like a comeback than a resurrection. Lou Reed never completely went
away – he produced a couple albums through the mid-80s (and this after an
entire, crazy productive decade in the 70s) – but New York seemed to revive
interest in him in a way that wasn’t possible for a while. Basically, New York
dropped at the beginning of the cultural moment when, as the awful phrase had
it, “the alternative went mainstream.” The concept of “mainstream” has slipped
a little – or maybe even a lot – now that everyone can burrow into his/her
highly-specific pop culture niches, but, basically, a cultural space opened up
around that time that was receptive to independent, off-beat, and, again,
specific voices.

“Dirty Blvd.” would probably be the song most people would
remember from New York, and both the song and the album grew out of the time. “Dirty
Blvd.,” along with a couple others (e.g., “Strawman,” “There Is No Time,” and “Last Great American Whale”) recall New York City’s crime infestation, but from an
angle of broken families and social injustice, and both with a nod to a broad
undercurrent of racism. It’s a decent album, full of the honesty and integrity
one expects out of Lou Reed, but it’s also something I don’t believe he, along
with a lot of artists, isn’t particularly good at: political. Between the
guitar work and song structure, it also sounds closer to…I’ll call it generic
rock, something vaguely exhausted.

Monday, May 8, 2017

“Future Panic” came about because I wanted to preserve the
post-apocalyptic essence of some of my favorite songs by Gorillaz (no “the,”
huh?). I only picked three songs by them in the end, but that’s a lot about me
being rigidly democratic on my playlists. In other words, if I’m going to make
a playlist, the thing is going to be mixed.

Portland’s very own, The Thermals show up a lot on this one
too, but I think the whole thing devolved into just…songs about…I dunno, outer
space? Before I got finished with it?

As always, and per the project, let me know what you think
if you wanna. Or just enjoy. Or ignore. Free country, and all that....

As always, I set up a playlist for all the above on Spotify,
but I figure if they have them, Apple Music, etc. will as well. Links are
embedded below for all the songs that didn’t show up on Spotify. And, won’t
lie, feel guilty about swiping The Make Up’s (fucking) classic, “Born on the
Floor,” because I sense that band is off Spotify for fairly specific reasons.
In my defense, I view this as spreading some form of gospel. “Born on the Floor”
is fucking genius.

One more thing: the distortion on some of this stuff broke
my wife on a recent road trip. You’ve been warned.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Again, this little project is about just sharing a “playlist”
– one that I slapped on a CD a few years back – that I’m posting here and on
twitter to let people judge it, love it, deconstruct it, tell me where I went
wrong, etc.

I titled this week’s selection Lovely, Lively. I went mostly,
if not entirely, up-tempo and the songs trucked broadly in the giddiness of infatuation
– though I definitely squeezed in a song or two, just because they kept up with
the pace. Or talked about love, generally. Those are some personal favorites (see, "F.I.D.O"). If you do listen to this one, it shouldn't take you long to pick up a little "mission creep."

Then again, some songs made the cut because I wanted to get,
say, a couple old Green Day songs onto a CD before I forgot about them. That
actually applied most to the songs by The Dirtbombs and The Gories, both
projects of the great and mighty Mick Collins. Man’s a goddamn genius, I tell
you…

At any rate, the Lovely, Lively playlist is below. There was
only one song that Spotify didn’t have, and there’s a link to a Youtube video
next to that one. I also included a non-live version of The Buzzcocks “Love You
More,” because I can’t make my ears accept recorded live music no matter how
hard I try. Just doesn’t translate for me…